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What if I told you 10 years ago that a presidential nominee who received more votes than any other woman in history and nearly won the presidency was relegated to the dustbin of history less than one year later?
Would that seem plausible? Well, it’s happening before our eyes.
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Former Vice President Kamala Harris launched the book tour that nobody asked for on Tuesday. The title of her tome, 107 Days, chronicles what can be considered the worst presidential campaign of our lifetimes. Team Harris blew through $1.5 billion in cash, and then some, ending up in debt, and got zero return on investment by losing every swing state and the popular vote, while also surrendering control of the Senate. In the end, and this number is truly something, 89% of counties in the U.S. went more red than blue when compared to the 2020 election.
“This is the first book to begin in Chapter 11,” Fox News’s Jimmy Failia joked this week on America’s Newsroom.
As she often has done throughout her political career, Harris uses the book to do the same thing Hillary Clinton did for her loss, “What Happened,” in 2016: blame almost everyone but herself. And she’s doing this while also laughably claiming that if she just had more time to campaign, the result would have been different.
Actually, it was quite the opposite: The more she spoke, the more she was seen, the more her poll numbers went in the wrong direction. Think back to late July and August 2024: Harris is installed as the Democratic nominee without one vote from the public after President Joe Biden is tossed aside by his own party following a horrific debate performance in late June.
But what did her team do for the first six weeks of the campaign? Not allow her to do even one sit-down interview, even in the most friendly confines of MSNBC, CNN, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, or The View. So it’s a bit rich for Harris to lament not having more time to make her case to the electorate while allowing herself to be sidelined.
But her campaign likely knew what many of us already did: Outside of prepared remarks in a teleprompter, Harris is a human Chernobyl. She simply has no talent for thinking or speaking extemporaneously. And when she has tried to do so in the past, such as her first run for president in 2020, she dropped out before the first votes were cast in Iowa.
It is ironic that Harris’s team has chosen The View for her first broadcast network interview for the book tour. It was here in October 2024 that her campaign essentially ended: Sunny Hostin asked her a T-ball question about what she would do differently than Biden.
“You know … there is not a thing that comes to mind,” she answered while looking skyward.
Game. Set. Match.
Here was Democratic strategist James Carville‘s reaction: “The country wants something different. And she’s asked, as is so often the case, in a friendly audience, on The View, ‘How would you be different than Biden?’ That’s the one question that you exist to answer, all right? That is it. That’s the money question. That’s the one you want. That’s the one that everybody wants to know the answer to. And you freeze! You literally freeze and say, ‘Well, I can’t think of anything’”
Usually, a major book tour like this is used as a stepping stone to another campaign. But it’s virtually impossible to see Harris running again. This isn’t Ronald Reagan coming back in 1980 after falling just short of the nomination in ’76. Her base is nonexistent. Most people who voted for Harris were voting against Trump.
A recent poll from Atlas Intel, the most accurate pollster of the 2024 election, has Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) easily on top when polling Democratic voters as to their preferred nominee at 37.6%. Harris, despite being vice president for four years and getting more than 75 million votes less than one year ago, is a distant second at 20.5%. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (12.1%), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) (10.8%), and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) (3.6%) round out the top five.
Speaking of Walz, who did the Harris campaign no favors as her running mate, thanks to him lying about fighting in war zones and claiming he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square riots — he was in Nebraska — Harris says she was forced into choosing the goofy governor of Minnesota because America wasn’t ready for a gay vice president in Pete Buttigieg.
As for her relationship with Biden, Harris claimed that she couldn’t ask him not to run again before accusing him of being reckless by staying in. “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision,” she writes. “We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
Again, this is all so phony. She knew what his cognitive state was and lied directly to the public about it. Here’s what Harris said right after Biden’s debate against Trump that ended his political career: “Joe Biden is extraordinarily strong.” She then said, with a straight face to Anderson Cooper on CNN that night, Biden had a “slow start” but a “strong finish,” an assessment that exactly zero other people came away with. “He got into a groove where it counted,” she later told MSNBC. “Our president showed that he will win the election.”
Uh-huh.
Harris is doing herself no favors with this book, and this already feels more like a revenge tour. How is Walz feeling today after hearing that he wasn’t her first choice as her running mate? How do the Bidens feel about her calling them self-serving?
On Tuesday, she sat down with Michael Strahan on Good Morning America. And her answer to the question, “Do you think Biden could have run the country for four years?” was met with the ultimate incoherent word salad.
“My concern about him running for reelection was completely separate from his capacity to serve … which was consistent and never wavered.”
So, she thinks Biden couldn’t campaign for a few months, but could run the country for another four years? How does this remotely make sense?
Harris’s book will finish at No. 1 on the bestseller lists. She likely got a hefty advance from Simon & Schuster. On that front, the book is a success.
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But given that she and her husband are already worth millions, this isn’t about the money. It’s about getting back into power again.
And thanks to napalming every remaining bridge to those who were once her allies, it’s safe to say this will be the last we see of Harris on any major political stage again.